Guest Post: Great Blue Heron Nature Reserve

Today, we have another guest post from The LANMonkey’s. It’s an interesting post about The Great Blue Heron Nature Reserve, in Chilliwack, British Columbia. There are a couple of good tie in’s to this post. As you may know, Mr. LANMonkey is co-host of The Caching in the NW Podcast. With his podcasting experience, he recently created an MP3 (Podcache) cache on our site, Walk in the Park with LANMonkey, in Langley, British Columbia, about 10 miles West of the Great Blue Heron Nature Reserve. What is an MP3 cache? Think of it as a letterbox type cache, where you go to the parking coordinates, and follow instructions to find the cache. But rather than written instructions, you download an MP3 file. Be sure to check it out! Additionally, we would like to announce that OCNA Admin DudleyGrunt (possibly with OCNA Admin NativTXN) will be a guest on The Caching in the NW podcast on July 2nd!

Have you ever considered whether herons nest on the ground or in trees?This past weekend our geocaching adventures took us to the “Great Blue Heron Nature Reserve” in Chilliwack, BC. As it turns out, they nest in trees!This location is quite easy to access, ample parking, and a nice selection of geocaches for the family on very well maintained walking trails.

You can use the multi-cache “The Tower” as your reference point on the Geocaching website to navigate your way there, but it’s just a few minutes off of the Trans-Canada highway.

It’s important to know a few things before you go:

The trails are open dawn to dusk all year

The interpretive centre is open 10am to 4pm daily with free admission

Some trails do NOT allow dogs 🙁

Only a few of the 130+ nests here

In addition, it’s helpful to know that “parts of the Heron Colony Loop Trail and Discovery Trail are closedin the spring to allow lots of room for the herons to forage and nest undisturbed.” This doesn’t seem to impact the trails along which the geocaches are placed, so that’s great news for geocachers.

All of that said, the experience this time of year while the herons are nesting is absolutely amazing. To see these giant water-striding birds glide gracefully into their tree-top nests at the peaks of huge cottonwood trees is stunning.

Heron in it’s tree-top nest

Our visit took us on one of two possible looping trails to pick up geocaches, but by taking the “westward” loop from the interpretive centre we were able to observe the 130+ heron nests from a distance that was safe for the herons and that our geo-hound Piggy was allowed on.Spending some time afterward in the centre chatting with one of the staff we learned that this reserve is the largest heronry (group of heron nests) in the Pacific Northwest and that the number of returning herons (on average) has been quite steady the last several years.

Visiting the Great Blue Heron Nature Reserve is not only great way to not only spend the day out geocaching, but also to learn more about these amazing indigenous birds in their natural habitat.

Resident eagles guarding their food source

Geese with a gosling nearby

Who is LANMonkey?

The LANMonkeys are geocaching adventurers from beautiful British Columbia who’ve been having fun exploring and geocaching since Aug 2012. They love to share the great places they visit on their caching adventures on YouTube as LANMonkey’s Geocaching Adventures, and Mr. LANMonkey co-hosts the weekly geocaching podcast – Caching in the Northwest along with The Bad Cop and Witz End.